


enlightenment

by ignitesthestars



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, One-Sided Attraction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 01:33:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5951158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Focus has been an illusive goal for Kylo Ren.</p><p>A dead boy’s weakness, that the man can’t quite seem to overcome. It comes in fits and spurts, whenever one emotion manages to dominate the others. Anger, pain. When feeling eats away all thought, and he becomes a creature of instinct. That is when he’s at his most powerful. When has has a direction to point it all in - that is his focus.</p><p>Until her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	enlightenment

**Author's Note:**

> **prompted on tumblr:** Rey isn't the only one who's been training. Kylo Ren has upped his game with a new trick: Force lightning. Rey does not appreciate this at all

Focus has been an illusive goal for Kylo Ren.

A dead boy’s weakness, that the man can’t quite seem to overcome. It comes in fits and spurts, whenever one emotion manages to dominate the others. Anger, pain. When feeling eats away all thought, and he becomes a creature of instinct. That is when he’s at his most powerful. When has has a direction to point it all in - _that_ is his focus.

Until her.

There’s no escaping the thoughts. Who is she, where is she from, _how does he know her?_

(the answers come in dribs and drabs, sullen, reluctant, curious, _thoughtful_ , from a place in his mind that doesn’t belong to him. _I’m Rey. I don’t know. I wish you didn’t._ )

She should be a distraction, but Snoke’s goals and his own fascination seem to be pointing in the same direction for now. He is given free rein to think, to wonder, to–

focus.

How does a scavenger barely in touch with the Force push him from her mind? Why would the Force allow her to possess his grandfather’s lightsaber over him? 

How is he still alive, when she wanted so badly to kill him?

( _I didn’t have anything to lose by trying. Maybe the Force knows you’re a jerk._

 _…I don’t know_ )

She doesn’t deny that she wanted him dead. Wants? She is soaked in the Light, but he can feel the shadows in her. The dark places she tries to hide, even from herself. He picks at them, a scab he refuses to let heal over. He will bleed her out to make her see it, if he has to.

Her friend might not recover, all because she was too weak to stop him. Does she look at FN-2187 and think of him? Of what she should have done to stop him?

( _Stop it._ )

Does she know what it felt like to kill Han Solo? The judder of his lightsaber, the resistance of flesh and bone, vaporising in an instant. The weight, of an old man’s body.

 _(Stop it!_ )

How does she feel about her resistance resulting in the end of so many people? Her defiance had been so bold, so bright. Was the life of Luke Skywalker worth so many deaths?

( ** _Stop it!_** )

It’s inevitable that they will meet again. And when they do–

She will fall.

He will make sure of it.

* * *

She is different and the same, all at once.

More.

His grandfather’s lightsaber is nowhere to be seen. She comes at him with a staff of silver instead, double bladed. There’s an ease to her motions that he doesn’t remember from their fight on Starkiller, but not a fluidity. She is as brutal a fighter as ever, the shock of each connecting strike shuddering up his arms.

They fight on Dantooine, with the weight of the dead pressing in on them. She takes comfort, in the memory of long lost Jedi.

He takes strength, in the fact that they are dead.

“You think you aren’t going to kill me?” he pants, over the spitting sparks of their crossed blades.

“You’ll answer for what you’ve done,” she snaps back. “It’s not up to me to decide what happens to you.”

“You really believe that?”

He plucks at the connection. The bond. Who else has a right to decide his fate? Who else _knows?_

“It’s not me!” She breaks the lock, comes at him with a flurry of blows that are nearly - _nearly_ \- faster than his ability to block. And there is a fire in his eyes now, a twist to his mouth that would almost be called a smile. She’s shirking her responsibility, then. How predictable. How like a scavenger, a no one, a girl who has only really had to care about herself, because there was no other there to be concerned for her.

He expects to feel her slip further. He _waits_ for it, for the inevitable step forward, the flare of pain that is the price he will pay to show her the road away from the Light. 

Her blade comes. But the pain doesn’t, and the only steps she takes are purely physical. Her attacking edge has shifted; she seeks to disarm him.

Does she think Luke Skywalker cares for her? That a Stormtrooper could really–

“Oh, shut up,”

He’s lost her. It’s Starkiller all over again, the breath after she opens her eyes with a new resolve. He has misstepped somehow, knocked her off the path instead of leading her further down.

The rage boils up from his core, the way it always does, but there’s an edge to it now. His thoughts don’t disappear - they _narrow,_ and the weight of his anger pushes him on.

“People are going to die, Rey!” He rallies - if he can’t make her attack, he’ll overwhelmed her. She isn’t small, but his height and weight are superior, and he isn’t injured this time. He brings them to bear on her, an exultant surge of energy suffusing his limbs as she stumbles back, forced on the defensive,  _losing_. “The Light side is an empty promise. You can’t defeat me with it. You won’t kill me. What do you think happens after we leave this place? How do you look your people in the eye when they’re mourning the lost? How do you tell them you could have saved them all, but you _didn’t?”_

Her wordless yell tastes like victory. There’s no finesse to their strikes now - all brute strength and wide swings, and she gives as good as she gets, but he’s struck a nerve. He pushes the advantage home.

**_What are you going to do?_ **

She puts on a final, desperate burst of speed and power and ability. It’s enough - it’s more than enough, they both watch his lightsaber flare off across the field in minor shock - and he thinks that it would have been enough to send him to his knees before her, once.

But he has focus now. He recovers before she does, and it’s somehow the easiest thing in the world to draw together that anger and pain and _need_. He throws his arm out, and Force Lightning arches across the negative space between them.

The echo of her pain jolts through him. He falters for a moment, but this - this is the answer. He can see it now, so clearly. Her teeth grit together, biting back a scream; he reaches into her thoughts and whispers to her. _It’s all right. We’re all alone now. You can scream if you have to._

Mental fingers scrabble back at him. There’s the grim determination he has gotten to know so well, the need to overcome at all cost. He sucks in air almost as an afterthought, one heaving breath after the other as he slowly, carefully, cracks his mind open for her.

 _Oh,_ she thinks weakly, _that’s how you–_

“Do it,” he whispers. “It hurts, doesn’t it? You can make it stop. _You can make me pay_.”

She wants to. Force, she wants to, and he throws images at her, one after the other. FN-2187 prone on the ground, Han Solo’s shocked expression, the arc of a laser across space, the knowledge that he could have stopped it and instead did nothing.

“I _hate you_ ,” she snarls. The Force gathers in her palms.

They wait.

They wait. 

They wait.

**_But I’m not you._ **

His head snaps back from the force of her will. The crackle of lightning falters, breaks - and she bats the last of it away with a slap of her lightsaber, staggering to one knee. Her body heaves. He tries again, but she - she’s smiling at him, or baring her teeth - the harsh hiss of air through them the only sound from her mouth.

Focus, he tells himself. Focus, focus. His own lightsaber is still in reach. All he has to do is use the Force and they can pick up exactly where they left off - he can end this - he can–

Slowly, agonisingly, Rey draws herself up to her feet.

“What are you going to do, Kylo Ren?” she pants.

He stares. He reaches. The Force answers, his weapon thunking into his gloved hand. And Kylo Ren–

leaves.


End file.
